The campaign was launched in the U.S .on November 2012 and in the U.K. on April 2013. According to their website, the group believes that rapid advances in technology and automation will eventually end in fully autonomous weapons systems. “These robotic weapons would be able to choose and fire on targets on their own, without any human intervention. The Problem describes numerous ethical, legal, moral, policy, technical, and other concerns with fully autonomous weapons.” SKR believes a preemptive prohibition on these weapons is desperately needed, ratified in an international treaty; much like the [land] mine ban treaty approved internationally in 1997.

From a certain point of view, SKR’s concern is not misplaced. Advances in unmanned aerial drone technology have become a staple of the modern battle-space with pilots often flying these machines from locations like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, far removed from the area of operations they are piloting over. This kind of technology has revolutionized the way wars are fought, however, due to their remote operating, collateral civilian deaths in places like Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan have become a definitive consequence of the technology. The numbers of civilian deaths are expected to be in the thousands. Colombia Law, as far back as 2011, has been calling for comprehensive data from the U.S. government to be released.

The National Interest reported in March of this year that Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, announced that the country is investing in “combat robots” and that “serial production” could go into effect by the end of 2018. While this might sound far-fetched, at least 30 countries have already deployed autonomous weapons, but are currently overseen by human interaction.

Nonetheless, the technology behind these weapons systems is growing exponentially and 88 countries just participated in the UN’s sixth annual meeting on autonomous weapons hosted by the Convention on Conventional Weapons this past week in Geneva. While most strongly agreed that there was a need to control this technology, the majority of member states did not conclude with any real actionable items, punting the issue until the convention reconvenes in 2019. Countries like Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Panama, along with a group of African states called for a ban, ratified via an international treaty, while other countries: Brazil, Australia, and Chile called for “a legally-binding instrument to ensure meaningful human control over the critical functions.”

Not surprisingly, countries like the US, Israel, and Russia expressed a desire to explore this technology further, noting potential “advantages” and “benefits” to having autonomous weapons systems kill without human oversight. Also not lost on anyone, the irony that these three countries are the ones who almost exclusively intervene militarily, maintain occupations, and unilaterally target individuals and groups in all of the countries who voted to ban this technology.

SKR relayed their disappointment at the gridlock of the member states, saying “The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots will continue to grow in strength and numbers the longer states take to negotiate a new international treaty. Will urge the public not to let the world continue down this dangerous path. Demand that your government works to draw a normative line on autonomy in weapons systems now.”

The final decision on future work of this convention will be in November of this year.

Syria continues to be the great humanitarian tragedy of our generation. According to I am Syria, a website that tracks casualties in Syria, over 500,000 have been killed with 10,204 reported civilian deaths in 2017 alone. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has also estimated that since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, over 5.4 million people have fled their country as refugees with millions more displaced internally. The Syrian civilians caught in the middle continue to experience violence from the regime of Bashar al-Assad, independently ran militias who act as the regional proxies of Iran, Russia, and Saudia Arabia, along with terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

As a result, Syria has been broken up into a series of enclaves or cantons that are ruled by whatever militia or rebel groups have established dominance in that particular area with territory changing hands on a regular basis. Al-Jazeera recently released a conflict map that showed the various enclaves within Syria and while the Syrian regime has reclaimed significant territory from various rebel groups, the largest independent region in Syria now belongs to Kurdish groups who control vast swaths of North and North Eastern Syria.

al-Jazeera Conflict Map

The Kurds have been some of the most stalwart allies of the US over the years; supporting military intervention as far back as 1991 when Iraq was invaded for the first time in Operation Desert Storm and have been a driving force in the more recent fighting against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq. They are also the largest indigenous group of stateless people with around 25-30 million individuals living in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Armenia. All of which poses a serious foreign policy conundrum for countries like Turkey who have been battling an internal Kurdish rebellion since 1984, and the US who have armed and fought alongside Kurdish groups in Syria against the Islamic State.

Ian McCredie, a long-standing foreign policy consultant in the Middle East who spoke to RVA Mag summed up this foreign policy challenge. “It represents another string in the Kurdish attempt at independence and thus a threat to Turkish unity,” he said. “The fear is that it [Syrian Kurds] will link up with Iraqi Kurdistan and then Turkish Kurdistan and keep the flame of resistance burning bright.”

As a result, the Turkish government has labeled any Kurdish group fighting for independence in Syria as a terrorist organization including the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, who are the mainstay of the US-backed force that defeated IS, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces.

And just to make it even more complex, since the start of 2018, the Turkish Army launched Operation Olive Branch (this irony should not be lost on anyone) against the Kurdish administered region of Afrin in Northern Syria. Sinam Mohamed writing for The Defense Post in February, gave a harrowing overview of the situation, “Turkey’s campaign against Afrin, which employs the full might of the Turkish Armed Forces and is heavily supported on the ground by a variety of jihadist groups of Syrian and foreign fighters, has already resulted in the deaths of 104 civilians, many of them women and children. What was formerly an island of stability within war-ravaged Syria is now targeted day and night by a modern NATO army, with homes destroyed by airstrikes and medical supplies running low.”

NAKA Flyer Supporting Kurds in Afrin

This has lead to an international outcry from activist groups globally who have supported the independence experiment of the Kurds in Afrin, known as the Democratic Federation of North Syria.

One of those activists hails from Norfolk, Virginia. Jacob George, an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) has helped organize a rally to raise awareness to the plight of the Kurds in Northern Syria. “They have created the kind of movement that is solidarity focused and worker-run, which the IWW has been pushing for since its founding in the early 20th Century.” This movement, according to Owen Jones at The Guardian, has been remarkable not only for its attempt at direct democracy, but for its acceptance of gender equality in a region long known for the oppression of women. Indeed, women fighting alongside men against IS in the Kurdish People’s Protection Units has been one of the most defining features of their experiment.

Each of these hallmarks of the Afrin experiment will be rallied for on March 24 at the IWW demonstration organized by George and his colleagues at MacArthur Center in downtown Norfolk. Yet, this is part of a larger show of solidarity for what is happening against the Kurds organized by the North American Kurdish Alliance (NAKA) and billed as an international day of action – with the NAKA calling for an “Immediate condemnation of the Turkish and jihadist invasion of Afrin.” McCredie was less optimistic about the future prospects of a Kurdish enclave in Syria, saying the regional powers will never support an independent region.

George remains determined, however, to support the Kurds in Afrin. “The Kurds have risen out of this history of brutal oppression, and are trying to create a society that is worth fighting for and defending. When a lot of leftists see this, they get really inspired.”